CEO Eoghan McCabe offered a similar vision this week. “Loyalty is magic,” he argued, recalling that the personal service he received at a friend’s chain of coffee shops meant that he’d walk past competing shops and invite friends to this one.

“It became kind of clear to me that on the web, you don’t really have those relationships,” he said, aside from “a few little outliers like Zappos who have invested heavily in great service.”

In order to enable those kinds of relationships, McCabe said Intercom has a couple of key features. For one thing, he said that businesses usually have to “stitch together” products to run an online help desk, email marketing, customer relationship management, and marketing automation. That’s a flawed approach, because they’re all trying to accomplish the same broad goal — “to provide simple, human service.” So Intercom brings all of that functionality together in one place.

Plus, McCabe said that by adding just a few lines of JavaScript to their site, businesses get a natural way to interact with their customers, not just by sending them marketing emails (which often come in at inconvenient times and are ignored), but also at the moment of greatest relevance — “when they’re inside your product.”

That all sounds appealing, but are businesses really going to become more personal and less spammy just because they have better tools?

“The thing is, no business inherently wants to be spammy,” McCabe said. “It’s shit for business. Even assholes know it’s a dumb thing to do.”

The problem, he said, is that there’s “so much friction in the process that you can’t afford to be very targeted and personal.” Eliminate that friction and businesses can do a better job at this stuff. That’s also why McCabe said most of the new funding will go towards improving the product, while also hiring more people to expand Intercom’s own service team.

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Crunchbase

OverviewIntercom is a fundamentally new way for internet businesses to communicate with customers, personally, at scale. It's a customer communication platform with a suite of integrated products for every team—including sales, marketing, product, and support. Our products enable targeted communication with customers on your website, inside your web and mobile apps, and by email.
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